4. Revolutionary Infrastructure, or What Is to Be Done

I saw energy transition once. That same building where I grew up, the one with the concrete backyard, also had a basement that was a wonderland of technologies from bygone years. There was a wooden high tank toilet for example, a Victorian-era invention that I have literally never seen anywhere else in my life. But the most spectacular relic was the massive steel furnace installed to burn coal to heat the flats above. The furnace coiled in the center of the basement like a dragon. But it never stirred; the building had already converted to natural gas heating by the time my family arrived in 1976. At the time I remember wondering why this dormant monster was still there. I now think in retrospect it’s quite possible that it was impossible to remove; its mighty metal carapace was so imposing that the building must have been built around it: quite the metaphor for coal’s central place in the making of modernity. Parked in front of the furnace was a steel cart filled with the remains of its last meal, the final load of unburned coal. Nearby a coal shovel was still parked against the wall. My friends and I used to take pieces of coal out of the cart and pretend they were precious jewels. They glittered even in the dusty basement light.

These days I often think about that furnace and its cart of coal. The end of the coal era in my childhood home did not seem to be the kind of orderly energy transition that many of us dream about today. But I also find something encouraging in that when the time came for change it happened suddenly and dramatically. The agents of the ancien regime dropped their shovels and ran for the door as a new world was being born behind them. Something similar happened at the end of European state socialism. In its final days, the gerontocratic order crumbled in upon itself with spectacular speed. The regime was little more than brittle form by that point, a desiccated Potemkin village of socialism. A firm breeze blew its façade over. At the same time, the social movements that had long looked idealistic and weak and irrelevant to the state socialist political status quo emerged from the rubble with the opportunity to set society on a new path. An East German friend of mine once told me that the lesson of living through the fall of the Berlin Wall was not that capitalism was somehow a better system than socialism; the lesson was that all systems eventually collapse. “The advantage is knowing that system change is inevitable. That certainty means that you always have to be alert to what better world should come next.”

I look forward to watching the last gas station close and to thinking about my children’s children playing in the ruins of petrol pumps. Maybe some future kin will happen upon a barrel of oil in a basement, the last container of fossil fuel, and gaze on it in wonder. I am certain that petroculture is dying; the question is whether what comes next is a better world.

I suggested earlier that electro is very likely to succeed petro. Electro wasn’t ready in 1910 to inherit the world that carbo made but the odds are better now. What we are witnessing today is the very early stages of petropolitics being absorbed and mutated into electropolitics. If you read this book some decades from now, say in 2050, this will seem obvious and so the uncertainty that clouds our contemporary horizon may seem very quaint. But the future will have to forgive us our shortsightedness. Since we are floating up to our noses in petro, the horizon still appears very oily.

The question that should concern us right now is what kind of electropolitics is coming. There are electropolitical scenarios that will feel very much like the petrostatus quo, built around centralized militarized states encouraging ecocidal growth in habits of energy and resource use. But there are also variants that will lead toward the discovery of more humble, equitable, and ecologically–attuned modes of modern life. What values will orient electro’s world? What legacies will be challenged, what new horizons will appear? Will electro continue sucro’s hunger for more and more? Will it maintain carbo’s love of machinic work and control? Will it extend petro’s thirst for mobility and plasticity? These questions mark the frontlines of social and political struggle today. If we need a slogan, how about: Electrify everything but demand a better electro.

Making a better future is obviously a political problem but I find it helpful to think of it also as an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure is a concept that is fundamentally relational. Infrastructure never makes sense on its own but only in partnership with something else, which infrastructure enables to happen in a specific way. The same material form can play multiple infrastructural roles. The pile of a pier infrastructures a human’s ability to walk above water. But for a barnacle, a pier pile is an infrastructure of domesticity, a possible home. Thinking about infrastructural politics allows us to ask, practically speaking, what will enable the making of a better future and for whom? The term “infrastructure” normally conjures associations with large engineering projects like dams and highways and bridges. These are good examples of enablement in that such infrastructure comes into the world incarnating specific social assumptions and values. A highway network incarnates the desirability of automobiles, for example, and also long-distance commerce. It is a massive social investment in enabling certain habits (and people), often at the expense of others. And yet our thinking about infrastructure need not be limited to giant masses of concrete and steel. Humbler infrastructures are just as important and often even more effective. I’ll give you a final example drawn from the petropolis par excellence, Houston.

“Houston floods” is a statement of fact one hears all the time in Houston, often with a certain sense of resignation. Truth be told, Houston is a wet place, one that has flooded nearly every year since the first settlers arrived. But this local fatalism about flooding made me wonder all the same. “Flood” denotes water out of place, usually water that exceeded its containment structures and inundated human settlements and transportation corridors. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha have argued that the concept of flooding is a symptom of colonial, cartographic power.1 That is, it is difficult to disentangle the idea of flooding from the historical, often colonial work of controlling wetness, of confining it to certain abstractly–determined river landscapes, thus rendering all other space as “dry” and fit for human ownership and occupation. This is certainly the case with Houston, which has been steered by extractive industries for its entire history. It has internalized the colonial mentality associated with resource frontiers the world over, including beliefs in human technological mastery over nature, in the supremacy of some (white) humans over others, and in labor and commerce as the essence of moral community. Built over coastal prairie, woodlands, and swamplands, Houston’s search for dry land has been a constant yet precarious enterprise since the beginning. As local architect Larry Albert writes, efforts to “divide swampland into solid ground and watercourse” have been the central infrastructural struggle of the city’s history: “to live, we separate something dry and something wet from the undifferentiated muck.”2

Climate change heralds more wetness coming to Houston in the short term, through intensified storm fronts and cyclones, and in the long term through sea level rise. Hurricane Harvey of 2017 was a pivotal event in the city’s struggle for dry land. At one point during the storm, eighteen inches of water covered 70 percent of the surface area of Harris County, home to more than 4.5 million people. Floodwaters damaged 204,000 homes—75 percent of them outside the official floodplain—while the total property losses from storm damage grew to a staggering $125 billion. After Harvey, billions of dollars were committed to new flood prevention infrastructure projects fashioned of concrete and steel by fossil-fueled machines. It’s an open question whether these interventions will be adequate to containing swelling wetness or not, but their results won’t be known for decades. What we do know is that past flood prevention infrastructure was both very expensive and clearly inadequate. This is why “Houston floods” is often followed by a sigh. The problem seems intractable in our era of rising, warming seas.

But what if the problem only appears hopeless because Houston is relying on the wrong infrastructure? Why would we think that the same high-energy, command-and-control designs that created the problem—building an extractive industry metropolis in a coastal swamp in a time of anthropogenic climate change—would be capable of solving the problem? I was recently talking to a well-known Houstonian landscape architect, Keiji Asakura, and he offered me a fundamental way of rethinking the problem. Once upon a time, the legendary Harris County public infrastructure czar, Art Storey, told Keiji that if every building in Houston had an adjacent rain catchment or rain garden, the city wouldn’t really flood anymore. What is a rain garden? A very humble infrastructure that consists of digging a hole or trench in the ground a few feet deep. Into the dugout you place logs, branches, sticks, leaves, mulch, pretty much anything at hand. And then you fill back in the soil and plant it over, ideally with local coastal prairie vegetation whose root systems can run meters deep and are excellent at sponging up water. As a rain garden ages, the logs and leaves decompose creating new, excellent soil that can be harvested in a periodic process of rain garden renewal. Meanwhile, the rain garden prevents rainwater from becoming runoff by holding it until it can absorb into the soil. This addresses a large part of Houston’s problem; the city is covered by too much impermeable concrete while the underlying soil has a lot of dense clay in it, which needs more time to absorb wetness. Flooding, in other words, is a function of one kind of infrastructural ecology. A different infrastructural ecology could adapt to wetness in a more effective way.

All the tools that are needed to make a rain garden are no more than medieval technology: shovels and wheelbarrows and of course people willing to dig and fill and plant. Depending on the size of the project, a rain garden can take as little as a few hours or as much as a few days to create. So, here’s a revolutionary idea. What if Houston were to declare a rain garden week and ask its citizens to do nothing other than dig and fill and plant the green areas around their buildings. At the end of the week, Houston’s flooding problem would largely be solved, all without channelizing bayous and installing giant storm sewers and digging massive detention ponds and, most importantly, without waiting for decades for a concrete-and-steel engineering solution that will never come.

Rain gardens are a terrific example of what I call “revolutionary infrastructure.”3 Revolutionary infrastructure projects are experiments in creating new relations and enabling alternative trajectories to the petropolitical status quo. Projects of revolutionary infrastructure are diverse, locally-attuned, and typically invisible to conventional infrastructural politics. The radical rain garden plan is invisible to mainstream Houston politics; it has no Bobby Tudors championing its cause, at least not yet. Yet, because it is hard to make something out of nothing, revolutionary infrastructure often captures and redistributes the materials and energies within existing infrastructural ecologies to do its work. The modern shovel co-evolved with the resource–extractive economy of mining, for example. But in a rain garden, those shovels inhabit a new set of relations that Timothy Morton and I have called “subscendence.”4 Subscendence is the inverse of the transcendental attitudes and habits that both created the modern world and brought it to the brink of planetary ruin. Transcendence is essentially a hierarchical control freak relation to the world. It holds that some humans are better than other humans and that all humans are superior to the nonhuman. Maybe the worst thing transcendence does is to try to corset the total excessive marvelous abundance of nonhuman lifedeath into one six letter word: nature. “How’s that clown car working out for you?” nonhumanity whispers back at us. The modern shovel was designed as a tool for the mastery of the nonhuman. But in the case of a rain garden, you can feel how those same shovels are now meshing deeply into ecological relations to try to create more stable and sustainable alliances between human and nonhuman forces. Making a better world will take a lot of this subscendent spadework.

But it will also take a lot of nonwork. I always worry that framing environmental struggle in terms of “hard work” (e.g., industry, thrift) quietly smuggles back in the carbopolitics of improvement through labor. Joseph Campana writes of how the centralization of oil capitalism in modern economies infiltrated cultural rhythms, creating an “interlacing of energic and affective cycles constituted by the oscillation between booms and busts” and manifesting in wild swings of exuberance and catastrophe.5 For Campana, petroculture disposes us to manic behavior even in our efforts to escape petroculture; he instead urges us to resist our most zealous impulses and to explore “powering down,” not so much in the sense of turning off lights and turning to bikes but rather by retraining “the susceptible and interlocking circuits of feeling and flesh” to do less.6 Instead of working harder at being greener, it could be that cultivating an ethos of ethical laziness might well be a more effective tactic for unmaking petroculture.

In any case, there is no grand codex or twelve-point master plan for revolutionary infrastructure. It has no general typology or theory. No one is in charge of it. Experiments that flourish in one context and set of relations might not fare so well in another. Revolutionary infrastructure is paddling and wriggling and sharing our secrets with one another. I like to say we discover its most advantageous forms as we feel our way forward on non-ecocidal, non-genocidal pathways. It is even possible, believe it or not, to build revolutionary infrastructure within the barren lands of academia!7 Revolutionary infrastructure is like the beachgrass in the Indiana Dunes. It creates a weir for gathering ambient forces and materials and shaping them into new scales and purposes. A massive dune would be nothing without the humble beachgrass enabling its accumulation of sand. Revolutionary infrastructure nurtures and cherishes the subscendent relations that deflate the bloated transcendent attitudes, behaviors, and institutions of the sucro/carbo/petro trajectory.

So, it is high time to ask: What is to be done?

Let’s start with what isn’t to be done. Let’s begin by throwing out the obvious nonsense: the hallucinatory idea of cleansing fossil fuels and the advice to wait quietly for one or another miracle technological salvation. Green capitalism as a whole is paradoxical. It will never be satisfied by sustainability. What we call capitalism is a metastasizing arrangement of production, trade, rent-seeking, and consumption that constantly fights for more resource usage and technological development. Its hunger is sucropolitical, it thirsts after the sweet taste of more. Its bones and sinews, especially in the rapidly industrializing world, are still surprisingly carbopolitical, driven by machines and coal toward relentless production of more things. Its epidermis is petropolitical, mobile, plastic, ever-reshaping itself in response to technology, desire, and fashion. You can’t reason with this obese Cerberus of sucro/carbo/petrocapitalism. And you can’t leash it and try to walk it somewhere to tire itself out. It needs to be starved and shrunken, which may sound cruel, but don’t worry; it won’t die.

So now that we know where we’re not going, we can ask again: What is to be done?

We need to commit ourselves to decomposition, to a decompositional politics aimed at unmaking the fossilized forms that suffocate us. Here are some things that can be done with the equivalent of shovels and wheelbarrows, limbs and good will. These are plans anyone can help with, each according to their own skills and capabilities. And there’s no great revelation here; if you are engaged with climate action to any degree, this will be a familiar list. Petrostate decomposition, to reiterate, is the primary objective. To this end, join or organize (as needed) direct democratic movements aimed at ending fossil fuels once and for all. Move from passive to active participation in the ending of petroculture. Of course, you should vote, but it would be better if you ran for office. And better still if you were to organize a movement that pressured the political class to change its composition. Outsiders are flooding into politics these days; you ought to be one of them. It’s good to support institutions of representative democracy and to demand that they be truly representative and democratic. But it’s even more important to march and to picket and to shout and to show strength in the streets. Stand with XR or create your own alliances.

The next great area of decompositional politics is in breaking petrohabits. The good news is that, as just discussed, when it comes to petrohabits less can often be more. The best advice is so simple: re/discover the joy of what is already at hand, care about duration, don’t rely on consumption as a protocol for achieving happiness and self-improvement, and be truly present for your relations and your environs. To paraphrase Neshnabé philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte, the settler-colonial civilization that is dying is dying for good reason. It was built on the expropriation of the very many for the benefit of the very few. A frenzy of supposedly transformational activity to stave off settler apocalypticism, as Whyte describes it, only threatens more of the same. The task at hand is the slow, painstaking process of restoring the relations of trust and care among humans, and between humans and nonhumans, out of which a better world can be born.8 Allies for that process abound. BIPOC environmentalist and feminist activists, movements, and organizations are already leading the struggle to unmake the racial, settler, and patriarchal legacies of sucro/carbo/petroculture.9 There are affinities, too, between intersectional politics of decomposition and the emergent field of degrowth ethics.10 The latter’s essential insight is that the cause of sustainability is best served by slowing down and being more ecologically and relationally mindful about where one invests one’s time and activity. Feminist degrowth thinkers express with great insight and clarity how nurturing the care- or solidarity-based economy—an economy that by emphasizing reproductivity over productivity sustains the entire social world, including irresponsible megapredators like Cerberus—can support making a more equitable and stable modernity.11 My friend Benedikt Erlingsson, the brilliant Icelandic filmmaker, has a lovely way of describing this. “So often when we talk about climate action we talk about the need for sacrifice and hard work. What we don’t talk about nearly enough is the amazing world that is coming. You get to work less. You get to sleep more. You spend more time with your family and friends. You have more fun. When you travel, you stay in a place longer. Who doesn’t want to live in that world?”

Who indeed! So, trade your petrothrills for what Stacy Alaimo calls “ecodelics.”12 As high carbon consumerism and competitiveness disappears from the center of social life, there will be even more time for enabling each other, for mutual thriving. In a cooperative and care-focused economy, it’s remarkably easy to reduce one’s resource use to a sustainable level because that is simply what the overwhelming majority of humans have done for the overwhelming majority of human history. Change is hard. Ambient toxicities are many. Unmaking petrohabits, including habits of petroknowledge, can and should be playful. Making new habits should be likewise. In that spirit of decompositional and recompositional play, here’s the rules to a game a few of us developed in the lead up to the COP meetings in Glasgow.13 You probably need a break from reading by now and this is just a lot of fun:

Cauliflower Love Bike

CLB is a card game that can be played in a number of different ways. (Get your own deck of CLB cards at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/no-more-fossils.) We suggest three ways below but feel free to invent your own. The purpose of the game is to create a platform for low-carbon fun by offering you some random prompts to get started. But wait a minute, what is “low-carbon fun”? Low-carbon fun is any pleasurable experience that does not require a lot of fossil fuels to make it happen. A walk in the park or a snowball fight with your friends are examples of low-carbon fun. Flying to a beach vacation in the Caribbean or joyriding in cars are high-carbon fun. The premise of this game is that we don’t need to give up fun to reverse global warming. We just need to focus on having more low-carbon fun. And that means using our imaginations and limbs more and our machines less. It’s a pretty simply idea you see. And since there’s nothing less fun than reading instructions, let’s get to the game already.

CLB has four different types of cards.14 Each type is color-coded. Blue cards are Feeling Cards. Red cards are Action Cards. Yellow cards are Object Cards. And, Green cards are Wild Cards. Each game begins by drawing one card from each stack and placing them in front of your group.

Wait, you’re by yourself? No worries. Then you’ll be playing CLB v1. Take those four cards and create an activity that fits what the four cards say. This is where your imagination comes in. There really aren’t any wrong ways to play the game. The only guidelines are Keep It Low Carbon and Do No Harm (not to yourself and not to anyone else). Here’s an example of v1. You just drew:

• Blue card: Hungry
• Red card: Play
• Yellow card: Bicycle
• Green card: Silver

Maybe you happen to have a silver-colored bicycle on hand and decide to ride to get a snack near a playground. That sounds like fun! But suppose it’s raining or you don’t have a bicycle. No worries. Maybe you have some aluminum foil in your recycling bin or some old paperclips lying around. Why don’t you make a small bicycle statue out of those instead? And imagine writing a short play in which a food delivery person uses that bicycle to have an adventure. Even playing on your own, CLB will give you a steady stream of quirky ideas for new experiences.

But things are often more fun with friends, we know that. So invite some over! CLB v2 and CLB v3 are versions of the same game that you can play with friends. Divide your friends into roughly equal groups. And do a card draw. This time you got:

• Blue card: Excited
• Red card: Jump
• Yellow card: Roots
• Green card: Cardboard

If it’s raining outside or you don’t have a lot of time, maybe you should play v2, the indoor version. In v2, every group gets 10 minutes to imagine an activity that uses all four cards and then the groups take turns explaining their idea to the others. Group 1 imagines jumping wind-up toy cars with cardboard wings over a big, gnarled tree root. Group 2 thinks it would be fun to jump around a cardboard obstacle course while trying to juggle root vegetables. Group 3 imagines inventing new jump-based dance moves while listening to Roots music with nifty slide moves performed on cardboard. Group 4 is sitting this round out because they are the judges. They get to decide which of the other three proposals sound like the most fun. That group gets awarded points = to the value of the points on their cards. And then there is a new card draw and a new group judges the other three. Play as long as you want and for as many rounds as you like. Pro tip: It doesn’t have to be about the points unless you want it to be.

The main difference between v3 and v2 is that in v3 you take more time and actually go out and do the things you are imagining. The gameplay is the same as in v2 until the judges decide the most fun idea of the round. And then everyone from all the groups goes out and tries to do it for a specific length of time, let’s say 45 mins. Everyone who pulls it off gets full points. But the people who have the most laughs, maybe they get a +1 for having a good attitude. And, if you do something you’ve never done before, give yourself +2 for changing your world.

That’s it. Pretty easy, no? So put these instruction cards away and start your first draw. Oh, one more thing, if you ever happen to draw the three cards “Cauliflower,” “Love,” and “Bike” then whomever wins that round obviously wins the whole game.

Good luck and have a great time!

What more is there to say? My final piece of advice is to keep fossil hunting and I hope this book will be of some use to you as a field guide. Each fossil you find is a small blessing. Each fossil you help to dissolve is a gift to the future. Remember that many of these fossils are already very brittle. Soak them with your sweat and tears, keep them warm. This will help to decompose them as quickly as possible so their elements can be recomposed in needed revolutionary projects.

But please don’t try to reach the distant shore all at once or on your own. Do what you can; don’t blame yourself that there is too much to be done. Accept that change will come too late, because too late is how change always comes. It’s OK to be slow and deliberate. Remember your quicksand training. Ignore the petroknowledge that tells you everything is hopeless anyway, so just settle into your front row seat for the coming catastrophe. Save your emotional energy to care for your relations and to help your fellow wrigglers in need. They need kind words and acts. Anxiety is rising because there is so much to fear: the megadroughts, the wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the exhaustion and salination of aquifers, the grid failures, the collapse of food chains, as well as the violent overtures of authoritarian nationalism and ecofascism that resound across the world, beacons for the growing legions of the desperate and miserable. All this is all too real. But, take a breath because fear is a poor compass. Fear is mania, an overinvestment in the now. Mania got us into our present predicaments. So, what the world really doesn’t need right now is more maniacs. This is only the first chapter of a long adventure, the panic of discovering you are caught in the mire.

Of course, we live in terrifying times. But what we don’t appreciate nearly enough is what epic times we also live in. It is not every generation that is gifted the necessity of making a new civilization. And that is precisely the task ahead. Like it or not, there is no way to avoid becoming revolutionary. History is coming for you. When you hear about a new flood or fire, the warning siren is also a wakeup call. Instead of despairing at the many sleepers around you, take heart from the fact that even an oil executive back in 1901 couldn’t comprehend that the whole world was on the cusp of massive change. Always, we live in ruins, ruins and tangles, ruins and tangles and births. For those who understand the stakes of not changing, our greatest fear is probably the persistence of the fossil status quo. Take another breath and remember that persistent fossils are rare, miraculous even, in the roil of a decomposing, recomposing planet.

This book is called No More Fossils and I hope it is clear by now that I just mean no more sucro/carbo/petrofossils. We’ve had enough of those fossils, thank you! Let the sediments of history bury what we can’t use to make a better world. Meanwhile, we can revel in those humble reminders of the multiplicity and tenacity of life that ebb and flow in the surf. And we can look forward to discovering the new life forms, the future fossils we are creating today.